July 30, 2008

Let's face it computing power is increasing exponentially. It used to take hours to rip a CD and encode it to mp3 (we're talkin 10 years ago), now you can rip and encode an album in about 5 minutes, and the bottleneck is the CD-Rom DRIVE. It can't read the CD fast enough to feed the processor. Now that's power.

Well now it takes a few hours to rip a movie from a DVD to your hard drive. I think you see where this is going. In 5 years the process I'm about to describe is going to kill hollywood the way it's already killing theRIAA. But unlike the RIAA, hollywood has a chance to fight back, at least for the foreseeable future. I'll get to that later

In order to make it super, extra easy to understand I'm breaking this down in to simple easy to understand (but not to ever ever follow) steps.

How a Pirate uses Netflix to Kill Hollywood

They Download some DVD Ripping software

Shiver me timbers, This may be illegal in your country! Then again, since when has that stopped a back stabbin' pirate like you?

For $16.99/month ye, the evil video-pirate, may acquire 3 DVD's at any given time. Which is convenient, because it takes about 3 days to get the next DVD from the time you mail one back. That means you can rip a new DVD every day and never miss a day. 30 Titles a month ain't bad (it's only about 50 cents per DVD).

They share the bounty with their mates, in secret

When ye use encryption the pirates code is safe (usually). It's not bullet proof but it really is an invasion of privacy if your ISP starts trying to hack the encryption on your internet traffic. Comcast is already being punished for similar offenses.

Ye setup a filesharing server! Filezilla has a windows ssh server, which is easier to use. Otherwise there's the original OpenSSH server which runs on EVERYTHING.

While it takes hours to rip a DVD right now, you can rip the data to your hard drive in about 10 min and do the encoding overnight. In the next 5 years though, we're going to see this time cut down just like we did with music. Especially with the parallelize-able nature of video encoding.

(source: codinghorror.com)The only way the MPAA can fight back is by increasing the resolution of the video. Each time they double the height resolution of the video - which is approx the difference between dvd (480p) and blue ray (1080p) - you need 4 times as long to process it.

I think that when the time it takes to rip a movie is 10 minutes or less, is when people will start ripping and swapping video the way they do with music. The MPAA can only hold off the pirates a little longer... I'd say 5 years, 7 at most, and only if blueray catches on as a movie format.

Here is the musician definition (if you're classically trained at least). From wikipedia:

In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin cadentia, "a falling") is a particular series of intervals or chords that end a phrase, section, or piece of music. Cadences give phrases a distinctive ending, which can, for example, indicate to the listener whether the piece is to be continued or concluded. (read more...)

In other words, a cadence is how a phrase ends. It's what makes it feel like it's going to continue or that it's complete, and it's one of the first things you learn about in a music theory class.

The literary meaning of the word cadence is related, quite different. This can come up if you're working with a lyricist who knows a lot about writing, and literature. From the UWC writing center's website:

Cadence: the natural sound pattern created by the spoken word

I'd venture to say that the music theory definition is far more commonly known, especially as evidenced by the fact that wikipedia has only the following definition for the literary term, and an entire page dedicated to the musical term:

(speech) A fall in inflection of a speaker’s voice, such as at the end of a sentence.

A Google search for define: cadence returns similar results. Leave it to grammar-bot to know only the most obscure definition of a word! Damned higher education ;)

July 24, 2008

In my group of friends there is a bit of an inside joke about starting side projects. All of us are in at least 20 or 30 hypothetical side projects, but really only have one or two active musical endeavors at any given time (with tim as a notable exception).

So I was wondering what the state of online music collaboration websites is. Are there any good ones? Ok... so I realized I should google before I ask... just like you should think before you speak. Kompoz.com is a very cool site.

Basically you just upload a song idea, and then either send it to a friend (or make it available to random users) to add to, and it keeps track of each new version of the song so you can go back.

Then I noticed a developer API. Hot damn! So I got to thinking I could start adding extensions... like adding an inaudible noise pattern to the audio files before the song starts as a homing beacon. Then when the song gets re-uploaded it can sync the two and remove the old track leaving just the stuff that was added. Then it would be like a community multi-track program.

I also noticed the site also doesn't have much support people who want to use it for writing songs among a consistant group of people (say a band *wink*). I could possibly hack together something that makes it more useful to bands for closed collaboration.

Another idea I had that I thought would be cool is if they linked up with the Last.fm api and allowed you to import your music taste into your profile.

Anyway let me know what you think! Talk to me baby... I need your sweet, sexy ASCII text to facilitate communication between us so I can understand what you think about this topic which we are discussing!

July 22, 2008

Harris left a comment on my last post asking if I could post the project files to my song Crooked, so could practice his de-noise powers on it. I thought to myself, What a wonderful idea! So today is game day.

The name of the game is Crooked Mixing, because you'll have to apply some pretty crooked mixing techniques to tame that noise!

Rules of Crooked Mixing:

You have to use the noisy track.

The noisy guitar mic (the Nady CM88) must be within 6dB of the volume of the other guitar mic. The easy solution - the solution you should use in a real life production situation - is to just mute the CM88 and use a digital reverb instead. That's just no fun.

You have to tell us how you did it.

You must provide the strategy, and a short description of the general path you took to get to the finished copy.

You have to use the raw tracks.

I included my processed tracks as well as the raw tracks. No cheating people.

Also, here's a nice pic of the progress of my drum hack. I've got about an hour of work left. It doesn't look like you'll be able to use the midi functionality while you're playing the drums in-game though. Oh well.

The world just can't handle how cool I am. I'm expecting a comment from you >:-|

July 20, 2008

Today I was faced with an interesting dilemma; re-record a track, or deal with the noise I inadvertently picked up.

I think that if you do pickup a little noise during a take, you should consider the take as if the noise isn't there. Is it a great take? just ok? could you do it the same over again? better?

If you can do it better, or the same. Throw it out, eliminate the source of noise and just do it again.

But what if you can't do it again? You tried for half an hour and never nailed it just so again? I say keep the take with the noise. Of course there are degrees to how abrasive the noise is, so use your best judgment.

In the end, the recording I was working on just wasn't that important and I was pressed for time, so I kept the noisy takes. I was also going for an indie low-fi sound, and I considered adding some extra noises to the song as well to further the mood. If you're interested, you can check out the song.

July 11, 2008

My buddy Tim brought the concept of Crap Art, and more specifically, the Album-a-day, to my attention. Man was I missing out...

I have to say, this is something everyone should do at least once - like driving until you run out of gas, or staying up all night to watch the sunrise.

Album-a-day is not a site where a favorite album is highlighted each day. No... it's something far more interesting than that. Album-a-day is when people write, and record an entire album in 24 hours. It's an exercise in creativity.

July 3, 2008

Every mastering house has a rack full of limiters. compressors and exciters to make your songs as loud as humanly possible, and there's definitely a bit of mania to it. but...

I for one welcome our dynamics reducing overlords.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should squash every little clip of audio like a roach, there are definitely some things that deserve the high fidelity bestowed upon them by the audio gods - classical, folk, acoustic. Even indie rock can benefit from remaining in it's unadulterated form.

But in the age of surreal performances, artificial instruments, and the "Radio mix", I don't see a huge problem globing on the compression as just one more layer of distortion.

After all, if the end listeners like it, isn't that what we're really going for?

Of course you can argue that if you just turn it up, it sounds better without the compression, but I have personal experience that this is not necessarily the case...

Heavy, brick-wall limiting (compression on horse steroids), changes the tone of the music, not just the dynamics. After a lot of top 40 listening, many people grow familiar with this tone, and begin to expect it. Anything without that "hyper-squashed" tone doesn't sound professional to them.

I don't know about you, but I like to make a slick, professional first impression. Don't you?

edit: I would have left this as a comment but there are already about 30 comments, and I want to make sure people see it. So I learned 3 things today:

Audiophiles hate compression as much as I thought they did.

Sarcasm is in fact, dead on the internet ;)

You really can get a bunch of blog traffic by pissing people off.

With that said, maybe I should start a feud that divides the internet using population in half... comments? ideas?